Bob Dylan was knockin’ on the Vatican’s door for a private audience with Pope Leo XIV.
Dylan, 85, met the pope, 71, at the Vatican City’s Apostolic Palace on Wednesday, November 4, dressed in a black hoodie that he paired with coordinating trousers, gloves and a polka dot scarf.
Dylan’s visit was brief, according to Vatican News. Leo gave the “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” musician a rosary before Dylan presented the head of the Catholic church with a copy of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One.
Months earlier, Leo quoted Dylan’s unpublished protest song, “Go Away You Bomb,” in his book Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift, which was released this summer.
“‘I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned an’ man-handled,’” the pope quoted Dylan in a passage.
Dylan had written “Go Away You Bomb” in 1963 for the Greenwich Village Protest Center’s Izzy Young.
“I asked everyone I knew to write a song about the nuclear bomb,” Young told Rolling Stone in 2013. “Bob Dylan came in literally the next day and handed this to me.”
Dylan is hardly the first music star to meet Leo, the first American-born pope.
“This is a moment that shall forever produce a smile,” Patti Smith wrote via Instagram in July after meeting Leo at the Vatican.
One month earlier, Leo visited with Bad Bunny.
“[Young people] are looking for something more … [a] spiritual dimension in their lives. They realize there’s an emptiness, and a lack of a sense of meaning,” Leo told reporters afterward, per Rolling Stone. “If they are confronted with the question, do they want to see Bad Bunny or do they want to see the pope? I think many will see Bad Bunny, but I think there will also be a few here to see the pope. And that says something.”
Leo (born Robert Francis Prevost) was named the pontiff in May 2025 after a conclave of international cardinals voted on Pope Francis’ successor. (Francis died one month earlier at the age of 88.)
“Thank you to my Cardinal brothers who chose me to be the Successor of Peter and to walk together with you as a united Church searching all together for peace and justice, working together as women and men, faithful to Jesus Christ without fear, proclaiming Christ, to be missionaries, faithful to the gospel,” Leo said in a speech at the time. “I am a son of Saint Augustine, an Augustinian. He said, ‘With you I am a Christian, for you a bishop.’ So, may we all walk together towards that homeland that God has prepared for us.”
